So, in a drastic maneuver involving a small amount of drinking, I did some stand-up last night. It went swimmingly. For those of you that don't know what the adverb 'swimmingly' means, it means 'well' or 'good' depending on usage. That's not a webster quote, but I think you'll find that it will suffice.

The best part, in my humble opinion, of my act last night was my heckler. She was a girl, and she was really drunk. Every other time I've performed, hecklers have fucked my world. I would lose my train of thought, forget jokes, generally get flustered, etc. This time, however, I gave it to her. It was like the pent up rage at every heckler I've ever seen or heard of bubbled out of me in this stream of witty insults (some original, some not.) There are two specific instances that come to mind, though there is a third I'll explain in greater detail. I should probably preface this by saying that I might have provoked her. The story goes like this: Her band went before me, and they kept asking for encores. The vast majority (at least of people around me) wanted them off the stage. I had been waiting for 3 hours to do my 7ish minute act. This is how open-mics work, I wasn't pissed about this. I mean, it's like 15 more minutes when I've been waiting all night, you know? I was trying to grasp the balls it would take to ask the audience to ask you for an encore, and then when nobody says anything, to keep playing WAY (Is that emphasized enough? I don't think so), WAY past your allotted time. So the first thing I said on stage, after "Hello Dinkytown!" was "Let's all give a big round of applause for pretention. Yeah, come on, give it up, pretention everybody." Some people got the reference to the assholes ahead of me, some didn't. Anyway, enough prefacing. Moving on.

I was doing a bit about Jesus (well, it's not really about Jesus, it's really about something else, fuck I'll just write out the bit) and she shouted out, "What would Jesus do?"

The bit goes something like this: Jesus is credited with saying, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth." I don't really know anything about that, but I do know one thing the meek won't be inheriting: Social Security. Because it's all gone, and there's nothing funny about that.

But in the middle of it, she demands that I answer, "WWJD?"
I said, "Jesus would shut the fuck up."
The crowd rather liked it, but I think it would've been better to say something a bit more whimsical like, "Jesus, what would Jesus do? Well, are we assuming that he's here, and listening to my act, like the rest of the audience, or just what would he do in general. Oh. You hadn't thought it through that far, well, by all means take a few minutes, then interrupt me again when I'm trying to tell a joke that depends, very much, on pacing and timing."

Anyway, I said that jesus would shut up, because it was the first thing that came to mind.

Well, that really pissed her off. In the middle of my bleu cheese bit, she started yelling, and I (yes, I'm ashamed of it) ripped off one of my favorite lines from Mr. Show, "Look lady, I don't come down to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth."

The crowd loved it (now I'm getting to the third thing she did, after which she shut her mouth), and she got angrier. She walked up to the stage and was swearing at me, and I was swearing back, and she tried to take the mic next to me (Lo and behold, it wasn't on.) Then I moved aside and told her and my mic, "No, take this one, you are funnier than I am."

She said something into the mic about Dave Chappelle being better than me, "Dave Chappelle would kick your ASS!" I think that was it. I thought, "Yeah." The fact that she doesn't know that Dave Chappelle has about 10 years of life on me, and likewise has been doing comedy about 14x as long as I have made the statement very funny to me. I'm assuming she didn't know, because if she did, she would've known that it wasn't a very good insult.

Then they cut the mic out on her. That specific moment was one of my best ever. I just need to not get so worked up over hecklers. I mean, I kind of had to shout, to override her voice (the sound system there sucks) but I shouldn't have kept shouting once she got on the stage. I dunno, you live and you learn. One of the best shows I've done at a place where people don't come to hear comedy. Swimmingly. Quite.